Huckabee spoke to MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough from Columbia, SC, saying enthusiastically, “South Carolina’s a great place for me. I mean, I know how to eat grits and speak the language. We even know how to talk about eating fried squirrel and stuff like that, so we’re on the same wavelength.”

“Mika, I bet you never did this,” Huckabee went on, addressing Mika Brzezinski. “When I was in college, we used to take a popcorn popper, because that was the only thing they would let us use in the dorm, and we would fry squirrels in a popcorn popper in the dorm room.”

Back before he got all twitchy, Richard Pryor (arguably the greatest stand-up of all time, though my vote is still with Carlin) did a movie called Brewster’s Millions in which Pryor’s character, a hack of a minor league pitcher for the Hackensack Bulls is promised $300 million if he can spend $1 million a day for 30 days without actually owning anything at the end.

It’s not The Toy, but it is still a very funny movie and John Candy is hysterical as Spike, Pryor’s best friend and catcher.

Brewster, in a flash of genius, decides the best way to spend his money is on a political campaign for mayor, back when $30 million was enough to run for mayor of New York. However, instead of running for himself, he encourages voters to select “None of the Above” instead of either of the major candidates.

The movement takes off, however, and Brewster is actually in danger of winning the election, causing him to pull out, though not before spending gobs of money on parties and advertising, of course.

Yesterday there was a similar happening in the Michigan Democratic primary.

Because of the top-heavy primary season this year, several states tried to claw their way to the front of the pack in an attempt to heighten their own importance, Michigan among them. The Democratic Party, however, was having none of that and punished the Great Lakes State by stripping them of their delegates this year.

Essentially, the Dems took their ball and went home.

But that didn’t stop Michigan from hosting their primary early anyway.

Because it didn’t matter, several candidates decided not to campaign there, leaving only Hillary Clinton, Dennis Kucinich, Chris Dodd and Mike Gravel on the ticket.

When all ballots were counted, Clinton was named winner with 55 percent of the vote. Forty percent of Michigan democratic primary voters voted “uncommitted,” or essentially “none of the above.” And since Clinton is the only one “above,” one has to wonder about the level of dislike toward her to get voters to come out to the ballot simply to cast an anti-Hillary vote.

According to exit polls, 79 percent of voters in the Dem primary are registered Democrats while 18 percent were independents. Of the registered Democrats, 60 percent pulled the lever for Hillary while 36 percent went for “uncommitted.” Hillary also only got 37 percent of the independents with a majority – 51 percent – going “uncommitted.”

This does not bode well for the Clinton campaign or the Democrats. Within the party establishment, Hillary always tops the polls. However, among independents and Republicans, her negative ratings are very high, which says to me that the people currently voting for Hillary in the primaries are about the only ones who will vote for her in the general election.

And when half of her own party takes Monty Brewster’s advice and clicks “none of the above” it is difficult to imagine her winning the White House.

Democrats need to address these numbers, as uncomfortable as they may be, and decide exactly what “electable” means before the 21-state Primary Bonanza on Feb. 5 as many of those primaries are closed, meaning only Dems get to vote in the Primary (The Iowa Caucuses, New Hampshire Primary and Michigan Primary are all Open, meaning anyone can vote).

If the party establishment stands their ground and ignores that elephant in the room, they may end up watching an elephant storm to the presidency for a third consecutive term…

I am as guilty as anyone of talking about how both parties suck from the same corporate cock, but yesterday provided an interesting look at the differences between our two major parties – as well as in the parties, especially in the area of the economy.

Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts won the Michigan Republican primary yesterday based mainly on his history as a business man. Michigan has suffered more than any other state in recent years as the auto industry practically collapsed under its own weight, taking all of the support industries (thanks, NAFTA!) with it to the tune of about 300,000 jobs.

They call it a one-state recession as Michigan’s unemployment rate is 7.4 percent, with an increase to more than 8 percent expected in 2008. Because of this, 68 percent of Republican primary voters described the economy as “Not so good / poor” and 55 percent listed the economy as their number one issue in this fall’s election.

Romney’s victory over McCain is generally attributed to the former’s success as a venture capitalist who made his money turning around failing corporations. Romney has pledged to do the same thing for the US economy. Whether he can is a matter for a different day, but that’s the pitch.

For the record, Hillary Clinton received 55 percent of the vote in a Democratic primary that does not count toward the nomination and did not include Barack Obama or John Edwards. One would think she’d have done better considering she was the only candidate in the race…

“But I’m not an operating officer. Some in this debate around experience seem to think the job of the president is to go in and run some bureaucracy. Well, that’s not my job. My job is to set a vision of ‘here’s where the bureaucracy needs to go.'”

In the Democratic debate last night, Hillary Clinton, who has absolutely no business experience herself, challenged Obama on that statement and, drawing from the Bush 2000 playbook (and not for the last time in the debate), compared the presidency to being CEO of a major corporation and then compared Obama’s statements to Bush:

“I think you have to be able to manage and run the bureaucracy,” she said. “You’ve got to pick good people, certainly, but you have to hold them accountable every single day. We’ve seen the results of a president who, frankly, failed at that.

“You know, he went into office saying he was going to have the kind of Harvard Business School CEO model where he’d set the tone, he’d set the goals and then everybody else would have to implement it.”

Obama countered, rather effectively, that Bush does not listen to people who have differing ideologies or bring people together, where he would differ.

But once again, it raises the question about the role of president. Eight years ago, we elected a CEO and, like most CEOs of major companies in the past 10 years or so, he ran the country into the ground, making sure he and his buddies got rich off the whole deal.

Granted we elected a miserable failure of a CEO who ran several companies and a baseball team into the ground, but still…

So the question remains, should a president be able to run the government like a business or can we admit that the role of government is not to make money and we need someone with vision to aim the bureaucracy in the right direction?

The question I most want answered by any of the candidates on either side is what they believe the role of the president is and how they would best fill that role. Truly, this is the debate we need in order to pick the next leader as it is in the philosophy and role of president that the candidates most differ.

A Spartanburg mother is accused of stabbing her son several times Christmas morning, but her son is the person facing charges. City police say it appears the mother, 45-year-old Tammy Jones, stabbed her son because he urinated on her while she slept in her bed. 21-year-old Michael Anthony Carson, nicknamed Pooh Bear, is charged with aggravated assault and battery. Police arrested him at his mother’s home on Wednesday.

City police say Jones stabbed her son six times with a butcher knife. He suffered wounds to his shoulder, calf, and chest. Witnesses in the house heard Jones say “why did you pee on me Pooh Bear?” A few moments later, the witness heard the son say “Mama you done stabbed me.”

“The URL is to a PDF of the front page of the 12/14/2007 Lewiston Tribune (Idaho). Above the fold appeared a photograph of Michael Millhouse, painting a sign on the window of a business. But below the fold, he appeared again, in a still taken from a convenience store where a wallet containing $600 was lifted. Due to his size, and the fact that he was wearing the same clothes, he was easily identified and caught.”

Jeremy Clarkson, a presenter for Top Gear on British TV, wrote a newspaper editorial that accused privacy activists of being hysterical over giant data-leaks (such as the British government repeatedly losing CDs bearing the financial details for 25 million households). To prove that identity theft wasn’t a big deal, he included his bank account details in the article.

Whereupon someone promptly began making fraudulent withdrawals from his account.

“Signing a new major-label contract would have killed us straight off,” [Thom Yorke of Radiohead] added.”Money makes you numb, as M.I.A. wrote. I mean, its tempting to have someone say to you, You will never have to worry about money ever again, but no matter how much money someone gives you what, you’re not going to spend it? You’re not going to find stupid ways to get rid of it? Of course you are. It’s like building roads and expecting there to be less traffic.”

Craig, of Idaho, is asking the Minnesota Court of Appeals to let him withdraw his guilty plea to disorderly conduct stemming from a bathroom sex sting at the Minneapolis airport.

The ACLU filed a brief Tuesday supporting Craig. It cited a Minnesota Supreme Court ruling 38 years ago that found that people who have sex in closed stalls in public restrooms “have a reasonable expectation of privacy.”

public restrooms. expectation of privacy.

That means the state cannot prove Craig was inviting an undercover officer to have sex in public, the ACLU wrote.

::: crickets :::

… The ACLU argued that even if Craig was inviting the officer to have sex, his actions wouldn’t be illegal.

“The government cannot prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Senator Craig was inviting the undercover officer to engage in anything other than sexual intimacy that would not have called attention to itself in a closed stall in the public restroom,” the ACLU wrote in its brief.

the ACLU is arguing that sex in public bathrooms is ok and to solicit sex in bathrooms is ok. what’s the definition of sexual harassment? a little wrong place at the wrong time, a little disorderly conduct in inappropriate public venues?

The ACLU also noted that Craig was originally charged with interference with privacy, which it said was an admission by the state that people in the bathroom stall expect privacy.